Boxes and Arrows » Martin Polleyhttp://boxesandarrows.com
Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business.Tue, 17 Mar 2015 08:00:54 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Forms: The Complete Guide—Part 4http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-the-complete-guide-part-4/
http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-the-complete-guide-part-4/#commentsTue, 27 May 2014 08:00:31 +0000http://boxesandarrows.com/?p=6594In which we take a look at selection-dependent inputs, and see that they’re a lot more simple to put together than they look.

Forms. They’re often the bane of users’ online lives. But it doesn’t look like they’re going away any time soon. So its up to us, UX designers, to make them as smooth and easy to use as possible for our users while still reaching the best business outcomes.

In this, the fourth post in this series, we take a look at selection-dependent inputs. (I’ve also seen it referred to as “responsive enabling” and/or “responsive disclosure”). All this means is changing the fields that the user sees based on some selection that they have made or some information that they have provided. For example, if we’re asking the user for their postal address, we might have a field where they can enter (or select) the country that they live in. Then, depending on the country, we can change the other fields to match the standard address format for that country.

Note: “Responsive enabling” refers to having one or more fields that are disabled until the user makes a particular selection, in which case they become enabled, allowing the user to interact with them. “Responsive disclosure,” on the other hand, hides the fields, and makes them appear if the user makes a particular selection. I don’t recall seeing many forms that use responsive enabling of late, but I’m sure it’s useful in some circumstances, so I’ll include an example.

Responsive enabling

I think one of the reasons that this pattern has fallen out of favor in recent years is that it can be distracting. You have all these disabled fields, and they just take up space and draw the user’s attention away from the stuff that matters unless they click on a particular checkbox (which may only be relevant for a small percentage of users).

One benefit is that things stay put. When you use responsive disclosure to make fields appear and disappear, the content below them suddenly jumps downward, which can be jarring and disorienting. But nowadays, it’s easy to animate transitions like this, which can reduce the problem.

Anyway, in some cases, responsive enabling is going to be the right approach (where there aren’t too many disabled fields, and where it would be confusing not to show them), so let’s press on with an example.

In this example, we’re going to let the user opt in to receiving text messages from us to let them know about special offers. You would typically find things like this at the bottom of an order form. We’ll have a field where they can enter their mobile number, which will be disabled until they click the opt-in checkbox.

After you’ve set up a new Foundation project (this post explains how), add this HTML just after the opening <body> tag. (We’re not going to waste time prototyping the whole form–we’ll just prototype the bit we’re interested in.)

Somewhere within the page’s <head> tags, add this <style> block:

The result looks like this:

What I’ve done here is not very complicated. Like in the previous posts, I’ve used Foundation’s grid to lay out the form. In the second line of the HTML, I’m just squishing the form down into eight of Foundation’s available twelve columns, and adding a two-column offset to center it on the page.

The first bit of actual content is a paragraph to show where the actual form fields and labels would go if this was a real form.

Then we’ve got a row containing a column that takes up all twelve columns. (small-12 columns means it is twelve columns wide on small screen sizes and anything bigger, i.e., all screen sizes.) This contains the checkbox <input> (with id and name) and its label (which uses for to link it to the checkbox, so that you can click on it to toggle the checkbox too).

After that, there’s another row that contains two columns, for the phone number <input> and its <label>. Notice how this divvies up the available space differently for small and medium (and bigger) screens.

For small screens, we’ve got a three/nine column split, so together they fill up all the available width. But on medium-and-up screens, they are three and six columns wide. This is to prevent the <input> from being ridiculously wide on larger screens—Foundation makes each input 100% of the width of the column that it’s in. (By default, if the number of columns doesn’t add up to twelve, Foundation scoots the last column over so it is right-aligned. I’ve added the end class to stop this happening.)

The label gets the right class to right-align it, and the align class to align it vertically with the <input>. It also gets an ID so we can style it and do stuff to it. And the <input> gets the appropriate type (tel) and the disabled property to make it disabled initially.

The CSS in the <style> block in <head> just applies some styling to the placeholder text that shows where the real form fields would go and makes the “Mobile number” label grey so it looks disabled. (You can add the disabled property to <input>s, but not to <label>s—you have to style these yourself so they’ll look disabled.)

It looks OK so far. The phone number input is disabled, and its label looks disabled too. But it doesn’t get enabled when you check the checkbox. For that, we need a bit of JavaScript. Not much; just a smidge.

At the bottom of the page, right before the closing </body> tag, add this <script> block:

This is pretty similar to what we saw in the last post. All the code is inside the jQuery $(document).ready() function, so it will only get run after the page has finished loading.

Within $(document).ready(), this part of the first line selects the checkbox:

$('#cb')

that is, the element with the ID of cb, then this part:

.on('change', function(){

calls the on() function to detect when its state changes. The three lines within the curly braces ({}) specify what happens when this change event is detected:

In the first line, this bit:

$('#mobilelabel')

selects the label for the phone number field, which has an ID of mobilelabel, then this bit:

.toggleClass('disabled')

calls toggleClass() on it. This adds the disabled class to the element if it doesn’t already have it, and removes it if it does. This is the class that gives it the grey color, so removing it switches it back to its default color, black.

The second line declares a variable called checked. Then this part:

$('#cb')

selects the checkbox again and then checks whether it is checked or not like this:

.is(':checked')

This gives us an answer of true or false. The ! reverses this value. If it is true, this makes it false, and vice-versa. Then this value gets stored in our checked variable. I’ll explain why we need to reverse the value in a minute.

The third line selects the phone number input, which has an ID of mobile, like this:

$('#mobile')

and calls prop() on it to set the value of its disabled property. And the value we give it is whatever we just stored in our checked variable. This way, if the checkbox is checked, checked gets a value of false, which we use to set disabled to false. (Actually, I used trial and error to know whether I needed to reverse the value or not! I like to think of this kind of thing as being pragmatic.)

In fact, disabled doesn’t take a value–an element either has the property or it doesn’t. But behind the scenes, jQuery correctly interprets us giving disabled a value of false and simply removes the property.

Now checking the checkbox enables the input, so it looks like this (and unchecking it disables it again):

Responsive disclosure

For responsive disclosure, we’re just going to take the previous example and change a couple of things. Here’s the HTML:

The only changes that I’ve made here are to remove the disabled attribute from the phone number <input> and to remove the disabled class from its <label>. And I’ve added a new ID, mobile_container, to the row <div> that contains them so that I’ll have something to attach behavior to.

The CSS is a bit different too:

Gone is the rule for styling the “disabled” label, and in its place is a rule that hides the row <div> that contains the phone number input and its label by giving it a display of none.

As you can see, when the checkbox is unchecked, the phone number input and its label are nowhere to be seen:

To make them appear when you check the checkbox, we need to modify our JavaScript:

This is much simpler than it was before. All we’ve got now inside the function is one line, which toggles the visibility of the <div> that contains the phone number field. Using the toggle() function means that whenever the state of the checkbox changes, we either show or hide the phone number field. We don’t have to check the value of anything, store things in variables, or any of that stuff.

If we had additional content below these elements, it would jump down when the phone number field appears. It doesn’t take up much space, so it doesn’t jump very much. But imagine if what we were making appear was a whole sub-section of the form that takes up half the height of the page. Pushing the following content down by so much can be very disorienting.

It’s worth taking a minute to look at how we can use animation to make changes like this more palatable. We’ll add some more content after the phone number field, then add animation and see how it looks. Add another <div> containing some text below the hidden one, so it looks like this:

Now let’s change our JavaScript to include animation. Luckily, in this case, it is very easy indeed. All we need to do is replace the call to toggle() with a call to slideToggle(), so it looks like this:

Instead of just showing or hiding the element, slideToggle() makes it appear by sliding it down from the top, or hides it by sliding it up. Try it out here.

We can control various aspects of how this animation happens. For example, we can make it faster or slower by putting a value (in milliseconds) in the parentheses, like this:

Another thing we can do is control the flow of the animation (what is referred to as its easing). By default, jQuery animations start out slow, speed up in the middle, then slow down again at the end. We can change this by doing something like this:

slideToggle({easing: easeInCubic})

Note that to use additional easings like this one, you need to include the jQuery UI library by adding these two lines near the bottom of the page (before the <script> block that contains our code):

This starts off slow, like before, but speeds up and then doesn’t slow down–it just stops abruptly, as if it had hit a wall. Try it here.

We’re off on a bit of a tangent here, but I’ll just show you one more before we move on to the next thing. There are 32 different easings available in jQuery, and each one gives the animation a slightly different feel.

For example, look what happens when we change the easing to easeOutBounce:

More complex scenarios

Sometimes we are faced with more complex scenarios than just disabling or enabling part of a form, or showing and hiding it. Often these more complex scenarios involve replacing one set of inputs with another depending on what the user selects. The example that Luke Wroblewski uses in his book is a “contact me” form, where the user can choose to be contacted via email, phone, SMS, or IM. When the user makes a selection, the form changes to show just the relevant fields (email address for email, phone number for phone, and so on).

There are lots of different ways that a form like this could work. You could have the initial selection as tabs, with the appropriate form fields inside each tab. You could have a drop-down list for email, SMS, etc, with the form fields right below it. You could have radio buttons for the initial selection, with the relevant fields appearing either below the radio button group or below the selected option. You could even go with a progressive-enabling-style design, with a disabled set of fields after each radio button, with the appropriate set of controls being enabled when the user selects one of the options.

(And, of course, there are lots of other scenarios where one user selection changes something else. One that you see pretty often is two drop-down lists, where the first is for selecting a category and the second is for selecting a sub-category, or an item within the selected category. So on a site that lists second-hand cars, you might have one drop-down list for selecting the brand, and a second for selecting the model.)

I could show you how to prototype one of these, but that wouldn’t help at all with any of the others. And if I were to show you how to prototype them all, you would soon lapse into a boredom-induced coma. So what to do?

Is there some common thread can we draw out of all these different scenarios? Maybe there’s some technique can I show you that will be useful in prototyping all of these? Well, there isn’t really. All I can do is give you some pointers, which will hopefully help you to avoid some wasted effort:

Be lazy

There is the way that a proper programmer would do something, and then there are shortcuts. We’re not writing production code here, so it doesn’t matter if we cut corners. What matters is that it walks and quacks like the real thing. Or even just enough like the real thing to be moderately convincing. So going back to the example I just gave of a pair of drop-down lists, the proper way to build something like this would be to populate the first list dynamically using a list of car brands that you request from the server. Then, when the user selects a brand, you would make another server request for the list of models for the brand, and use that to dynamically build up the list.

But for a prototype, you might not even need all the possible car brands and their models. It might be enough to have half a dozen brands, and a few models for each. And instead of dynamically populating each <select> element with the appropriate <option>s, you can put six separate <select>s in yout HTML, one for each brand, hide them all to start with, and just use JavaScript to show the right one depending on the brand that the user selects.

Learn a few key things in JavaScript/jQuery.

You don’t need to know everything there is to know about JavaScript and jQuery to be able to do useful stuff with it. The ones I find myself using most often are:

Event handlers. Mostly, this means using jQuery’s on() function to detect when the user does something to some element, and performing some action when they do.

Chaining. Every function gives you something when it’s done. (In programming parlance, it “returns” it.) You can then do something with the thing it returns. So if you call the find() function on an element like this:

$('#myelement').find('li');

find() returns the <li> element that it found (if there was one within #myelement for it to find). So then you can do stuff to the <li> by chaining another function on the end, like this:

$('#myelement').find('li').hide();

hide() returns the element that it just hid, so you could, if you wanted, tack on yet another function to the chain to do something else to it. (But we won’t.)

Simple conditional branching. The if and if ... else constructs let you ask “is this thing true”, and if it is, to perform some action. (else lets you do something else if it isn’t true.)

Slightly less simple conditional branching. When you’ve got something that can have multiple different outcomes, each with a different action to be performed, if becomes an overly-complicated way of doing things. The JavaScript switch statement is perfect in these situations. It’s ideal when you’ve got something like a drop-down list with several options, and you want to do a different thing for each selected option.

Making stuff appear and disappear. We can use show(), hide(), and toggle(), as we’ve seen, to make stuff appear and disappear. And we can either supply additional arguments to these functions to animate them (and to control things like the speed and direction of the animation) or use special functions like slideUp() and slideDown() (and slideToggle(), which we saw above) to do the same thing. There’s also the animate() function, for when we want full control over every aspect of an animation.

Look stuff up.

The jQuery documentation is pretty good. If you know the name of the function you’re trying to use, it tells you everything you need to know about how to use it. And if you don’t know which function you need, it has category pages that list all the functions for, for example, getting from one element to another, or for inserting, removing, and manipulating elements. (Note that jQuery is an addition to JavaScript. Some things, like if and switch, are part of JavaScript, not jQuery, so you won’t get very far searching for them in the jQuery docs.) And if you Google for the thing you’re wrestling with, you’ll usually end up at Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for programmers. 99.9% of the time, your question will have already been asked and answered. For example, I wanted to know the correct way to find out if a checkbox is checked or not. So I Googled jquery checkbox get value, clicked the first result, and got the information I needed from the top answer. Easy-peasy.

Don’t be afraid of doing it “wrong.”

For anything you want to do, there are going to be several (even many) different ways to do it. Does it matter which one you choose? For a (disposable) prototype, it doesn’t. The only thing that matters is: does it work or not? If it works, it’s “right”. I’m sure a “real” programmer would take one look at most of my prototype code and snicker to himself under his beard. But it serves the purpose for which it is intended, so it doesn’t matter.

Having said that, I do have a couple of examples that you can take a look at. The first shows a different form depending on what you select in a drop-down list. The second changes the contents of one drop-down list depending on what you select in another. Use the View Source option in your browser to see how they work—they don’t do anything particularly clever.

Conclusion

Changing parts of a form depending on what the user selects is pretty powerful. We can use it to hide complexity from the user and make our forms more simple to use. It means we need to learn a bit of JavaScript, but we can do a lot with a little. I think it’s well worth the effort.

]]>http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-the-complete-guide-part-4/feed/0Forms: The Complete Guide–Part 3http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-part-3/
http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-part-3/#commentsThu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000http://boxesandarrows.com/?p=6375Forms are important—they’re the most common way to get information from our users. But just making wireframes of a form misses a big piece of the picture—what it’s like to interact with it. An HTML prototype of a form, on the other hand, can look and behave just like the real thing.

In the first post, I showed you how to lay out a form and align the labels the way you want, using HTML and Foundation.

In the second post, I showed you all the different input types you can use.

In this post, I’ll show you how to group your inputs and how to provide help to the user while they’re filling out the form.

To make the most of these posts, I strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty. Type in the examples and then check them out in your browser. This gets it into your brain, and your fingers, more effectively than just copying and pasting (or worse, just reading).

Grouping

When you’ve got more than just a few input fields, it makes sense to organize them into logical groups, which you then separate visually. This makes the form less intimidating. It looks more like several small forms than one long one.

Let’s make a shipping details form similar to the one we created in the first post. This time, in addition to the shipping address inputs, we’ll add an extra input for the user’s email address, and we’ll split the phone number and email address out into a separate group.

The most obvious way to do this would be to add a second <fieldset> with its own legend and put the phone and email inputs in there.

Let’s try it. In the index.html file of a new Foundation project (see this post to find out how to set that up), add this:

There’s just a bit too much to process here. We don’t need quite so many visual elements to separate the two groups. We could abandon <fieldset>s and replace the <legend>s with headings, but that would be semantically less correct. It would also affect the form’s accessibility.

A better approach would be to tweak the CSS a bit to reduce the visual clutter. Let’s create a new stylesheet and link it up from index.html.

So open up a new file in your text editor and add this CSS rule to it:

Call the file form.css and save it in the css folder. Then add this line to index.html:

It’s certainly cleaner. We could leave it at that. Or we could do some other things to further emphasize the grouping.

For example, we could put a thin horizontal line (<hr/>) between the groups:

Or we could give each group a background color:

Whatever works for you.

Inline help

Sometimes it’s not 100% clear from a field’s label what the user is meant to enter in the field. Maybe it’s something that is simply too long to explain in a short label, so we need some additional text to help the user out.

A well known example is the credit card security code, which is often labeled as something not very helpful, like “CSC” or “CVV.” Even “security code” may not be obvious to some users, so we need to provide the user with an additional explanation somehow.

There are several approaches we can use:

We can have a big lump of explanatory text at the top of the form. These often get ignored though.

We can supplement the label with additional text (usually in a smaller font size) for fields that need it.

We can use the placeholder attribute to give the user an example of the type of information required and its format.

We can have some help text that appears automatically when a field (or one of a group of fields) gets focus.

We can put an icon next to the label that displays help text when the user clicks on it or hovers over it.

The first one is not usually a good idea, so we won’t bother with it. The second one is technically very easy to do, so we’ll skip that too. And we’ve already seen how to use placeholder.

So let’s tackle the last two.

Automatic inline help

Let’s say you’re designing a form that lets the user order a piece of clothing–a t-shirt, for example. They need to select a size, but you want to direct them to your sizing chart if they’re not sure. So for just this one field, we’re going to have a piece of help text that appears when the size control gets focus.

This is a bit like what eBay does on the password field on its registration form:

(Actually, in a scenario like ours, it’s more likely that the “form” is just a couple of fields on a product page that allow the user to select size, color, and quantity.)

Our “form”: page structure

Let’s go ahead and build a prototype product page for our t-shirt. We’re going to make it look like this:

It’s got a title (the name of the shirt) at the top. Under that, there’s a nice big photo, with additional photos that you can see by clicking the thumbnails on the left (though we’ll fake this part–it’s not important here). And to the right of the photo, we’ve got our form, consisting of inputs for choosing the color, size, and quantity, and an “Add to cart” button.

Only the size selector needs inline help, which we’re going to display to the right of the selector. But when do we we want the help to appear? I think it’s best if we show it both when the selector gets focus, and when the user moves the pointer in the general vicinity of the selector. That way, it will work well on both touch screens and when you’ve got a mouse and keyboard.

The first thing we need to do is get our basic page structure set up. Start out with an empty Foundation index.html file (refer to the instructions in this post for that).

Obviously, in a real design, you’re going to have global navigation, a footer, and all kinds of other stuff on the page. But here, we’re just prototyping the essentials.

For our title, we need a row <div> containing one column that takes up the whole of the available width. (Not the whole width of the page, but the usable area in the middle, which by default in Foundation has a maximum width of 1000 pixels, and which gets shrunk down and rearranged responsively for smaller screens).

To achieve this, we give the <div> containing the heading classes of small-12 and columns. This means that for screen sizes of small and above (i.e., all screen sizes), we want it to take up the whole of the available with (all twelve of the available twelve columns).

So we need to add this to our index.html, right after the opening <body> tag:

Next we need another row <div> that will contain the rest of the content. Within this, we need three column <div>s: one for the thumbnails, one for the big photo, and one for the form:

Here, I’m using placehold.it to generate placeholder images, instead of using real images. (They have instructions over there that explain how to size the image, how to change the text, and so on.)

Here, the small- classes divide up the twelve available columns into three, with widths of one, five, and six columns respectively (for all screen sizes). The <div> for the form is empty at the moment, so we can’t see anything there yet:

Things look a bit scrunched up, so let’s add a bit of white space. In the last post, I showed you how to put CSS rules in a separate file and link to it from index.html. But for the sake of speed, this time, we’re going to put the rule in a <style> block in the page’s <head>. Within the <head> tags, add this:

This just adds top and bottom margins to the title, and gives all the images a bottom margin.

The actual form

Now for the actual form part of the page. This is also going to need some structure. Because we want to position the inline help to the right of the size selector, what we need to do is divide the form up into four row <div>s: one for each control and its label, and one for the “Add to cart” button.

Within each row, we’ll divide the space up into two equal columns, one for the control, and one for the help (where needed). So let’s add this within that third, empty <div>:

Notice how each row has only one columns <div>, except the second one. This is where the size selector will go—it’s the only one that needs a column to contain the inline help. And the whole thing is enclosed in <form> tags, because, well, it’s a form.

But until we add the actual controls, we can’t see if it’s right. So let’s do that now. Add the <label>s, <select>s, <option>s, the <input>, and the <button> so it looks like this:

Nothing here that we haven’t seen before. (Except I’ve explicitly set the value of the quantity <input> to 1, a sensible default I think.)

And how does it look? So far, so good:

This looks OK, but the form elements could use a bit of white space between them. So add this rule, again between the <style> tags in <head>:

This just adds bottom padding to each row. Now the only thing we need to add is the inline help itself. Oh, and there’s the little matter of making it appear and disappear when we want. We’ll get to that in a minute.

First let’s add the HTML. Inside that empty <div> (the one right after the size <select>), add this:

This uses Foundation’s panel and callout classes to style it, plus some inline styling to make it a bit more compact. (Any bigger, and it’ll make the row taller, which means things will jump around when we show and hide it.) It also has an aria-live attribute so that screen readers will be aware of the content when we make it suddenly appear on the screen.

This is how it looks now:

Now we need to hide it, so we just add display: none; to the existing style attribute of the inner <div> (the one with the panel and callout classes), so it looks like this:

Next, we need to show it and hide it. The only way to do this is with JavaScript. This is more like “proper programming”, but don’t be put off by that—I’ll do my best to make it simple and easy to understand.

JavaScript: show help on focus

First, we need somewhere to put our JavaScript code. Normally, you would keep it in a separate file, so you can reuse it in multiple HTML pages. But for simplicity, we’ll add it in a <script> block at the bottom of the page, a bit like what we did with the CSS rules in the <style> block earlier.

Now, jQuery is included with Foundation, so that’s what we’ll be using here. All the code we’ll be writing will go inside jQuery’s $(document).ready() function. This means that whatever we put inside it will only get run once the page has loaded.

To start with, we’ll add some code that shows our inline help <div> when the size <select> gets focus. (This happens when the user clicks or tabs to it. Or when they tap on it on a touch device.) So add this <script> block at the bottom, right before the closing </body> tag:

Do not be alarmed! This may look a bit intimidating, but if we take it piece by piece, you’ll see there’s not a lot to it.

The <script> tags tell the browser that what’s inside is Javascript. The $(document).ready() function, as I explained, tells the browser to run the code inside it only after the page has loaded. The real meat here is what is between the curly braces (i.e., after $(document).ready(function(){ and before });).

Let’s look at the first bit:

$('.field_row input, .field_row select')

This says “Hey, jQuery, find any <input> or <select> that is a child of something with a class of field_row.”

jQuery uses the exact same selectors (and ways of combining them) as CSS. So that’s one less thing to learn. (I covered the very basics of CSS, among other things, in this post.)

So just like in CSS:

A period means it’s a class name. (.field_row means any element with a class of field_row.)

A hash (#) means it’s an element ID. (#size_selector means the element with the ID size_selector.)

Two selectors separate by a space means the second one must be a child of the first for the selector to apply. (div input means any <input> that is a child of a <div>.)

A comma means “or”. (input, select means any <input> or <select>.

You can combine selectors in other ways. For example, div.field_row means a <div> with a class of field_row.

OK, on to the next part:

.on('focus', function(){

This says “For whatever we just selected, do something when it gets focus.” on() is what’s called a function. A function is just a chunk of code that has a name that you can use to run it (to “call it”, in programming terms). (The period means “Call this function on the thing we selected.”)

on() looks out for an event, and does something when that event occurs. In this case, the event is focus. You can tell on() to look out for other events too, like click or mouseover.

Everything between the last (opening) curly brace after function() and the closing curly brace here:

});

is the code that actually gets run when on() detects that one of the selected elements has been given focus. That’s this line:

$(this).parent().parent().find('.help').show();

What this says is:

Take the element that was clicked (this).

Find its parent element. (In this case, the parent of the <input> or the <select> is the column <div> that contains it.)

Within this element, find any element with a class of help. (That’s the inline help <div>.)

Finally, show it.

This technique, where you call one function after another like this, is called chaining. It can save you a lot of work. (The alternative would be to store the element you get in step 2, then (step 3) call parent() on what you stored, then store that, and so on and so on.)

Phew!

Now if you click on the size <select> (or tab to it), the inline help magically appears. But it doesn’t go away when the <select> loses focus.

JavaScript: hiding help when the selector loses focus

Luckily, to make this happen, we can just copy our existing code and make a couple of small changes. Copy the three lines of code (the ones that call on()), add a couple of blank lines below it, then paste them in. Now just change focus to blur and show to hide. The code you pasted in should now look like this:

If you try it now, you’ll see that when the <select> gets focus, the help appears, and when it loses focus, it disappears again. Great! But it’s not enough. Earlier we said we want the help to appear on hover as well. This isn’t a problem— a few more lines of code will do it. But where do we want the hover to work?

JavaScript: show help on hover too

Here, our help text contains a link (to a page that doesn’t exist, unless you feel like creating it). If the help appears when you hover over the <select>, when you go to click the link, it will disappear as soon as your pointer leaves the <select>. Which is not very nice.

We need to make the hover work for the element that contains both the <select>and the help, that is, the row <div>.

Let’s add some more code within our <script> block:

This time, the selector is simpler, because we’re just targeting the rows (that is, the <div>s with a class of field_row). (You may be wondering why I’m using this class, which applies to all four rows, instead of just sticking an ID on the one row that contains the help and use that here. The answer is that this way is more flexible—if I want to add help for another field later, I can just add it to the HTML and it will work, without having to change anything in the JavaScript.)

Instead of on() after the period, this time we’ve got a function called hover(). In contrast to on(), where we specified one piece of code that was run when the event was detected, here we need two: one that tells jQuery what to do when the hover begins, and one that tells it what to do when it ends. That’s why there are two function(){}s.

The code for hover start goes inside the curly braces in the first function(){}, while the hover end code goes in those of the second. To make things easier to read, lets split it up onto separate lines, like this:

Now we can just put the code that actually does stuff in those two blank lines. This code is going to be exactly the same as for the focus and blur events, except here, we don’t need those calls to parent() to navigate up from the field to the row <div>, because we’re already there. Add the necessary lines to make your code look like this:

If you try it now, you’ll see that hovering anywhere in the size row makes the help appear, and when you move away, it disappears. Yes!

Except what happens when the size <select> has focus, and then you hover and move away? No! The help disappears! That shouldn’t happen!

JavaScript: actually, don’t hide it when the hover ends, in this one specific case

What to do? Well, what we need to do is check if the <select> has focus before we hide the help (at the end of the hover)—and if it does have focus, we do nothing. For this, we’ll use JavaScript’s if construct. This lets us check if something is true, then do something. (And if it’s not true, we can either do nothing or do something different.)

Change your code so it looks like this:

What’s going on here? The only new thing here is that we’ve wrapped the line that hides the help in an if block. The line inside the block only gets executed if the bit in the parentheses after if is true. Let’s take a look at that expression:

!$(this).find('input, select').is(':focus')

Ignore the exclamation point for a moment. this is the row <div>. Within this <div>, we’re using find() to get either the <input> or the <select>, and then we use the is() function (which checks if an element has certain attributes) to check if it has focus.

But this gives us an answer of “true” if the element does have focus. But we want to to hide it only if it doesn’t have focus. That’s where the exclamation point comes in. It means “not”, and simply reverses the result of the expression—true becomes false and false becomes true.

User-triggered inline help

You’ll be relieved to hear that user-triggered inline help is much easier to set up. All we need to do is take the prototype we just created and make a few changes (mostly removing stuff).

Adding an icon

First off, we need to add some kind of icon that the user can click or hover over to bring up the help. There is a set of Foundation icons that you can use just by adding one line to your page’s <head>:

Let’s add an “i-in-a-circle” icon to the “Size” label. Find it in your HTML and change it so it looks like this:

The fi-info class on the <i> element is how we specify which icon we want. (Other icons get fi-something-else, like fi-heart for a heart or fi-flag for a flag.)

The Foundation icons are an icon font. This means that you can style them just like text. You can make them bigger, change their color, add shadows, whatever. For now, we’re just making the icon a bit bigger, making sure it lines up with the label, and changing the pointer to a hand so that it looks clickable.

Note that the <i> can’t be inside <label> because clicking the label gives focus to the <select> (because of the for attribute that links the two). If we put the icon inside <label>, clicking it the same as clicking the label.

Also, we need to set the <label>’s display to inline-block (instead of the default of block) to force the label and the icon to stay on the same line.

New JavaScript for new behavior

Now, how do we want it to behave? If we make it so that the help only appears when you hover over the icon, then we’re in the same situation we would have been in if we’d made it appear when you hover on the <select>—when you go to click on the link in the help, it disappears before you can.

There are a couple of things we can do. We could introduce a delay, so that when the pointer moves away from the icon, the help does not disappear immediately. The other alternative is to make the help appear when you click on the icon, and have some way to dismiss it. Since we’ve already seen how to make things happen on hover, let’s go for the click-triggered help this time.

Within our $(document).ready(), we can get rid of all the code and replace it with this:

Here, we’re targeting the <i> element with a class of fi-info (our icon), and we’re telling the on() function to look out for click events on it. When it detects a click, we want it to start at this (the icon), go up two levels in the page hierarchy (by calling parent() twice), which takes us to the row <div>, and then call toggle() on it.

toggle() is rather clever. It hides the element if it’s visible, and shows it if it’s hidden. This means you don’t need to keep track of its visibility. So that’s less work for us. And it gives us a way to dismiss the help—you just click the icon again (which is nice and symmetrical).

Bonus learnings! Or I came for the forms, but stayed for the RWD

If you look at either of the above examples on your phone, you’ll see that it’s just the same thing, but squished down and misaligned. This is a bit of a shame. Foundation is a responsive front-end framework—we can use it to change the layout on smaller screens to something that makes better use of the available screen space.

Above, we used small- column classes for everything. This means that the defined layout is used for small, medium, and large screens. All we need to do is change the classes a bit to tell Foundation how the page should be laid out on smaller screens.

Here, we’re just going to have two layouts: one for small (phone-sized) screens, and one for medium (tablets) and large (desktop) screens.

In our small layout, what we really want is to just have everything stacked vertically: first the title, then the thumbnails, then the big picture, then the form. We can get this by just changing every small- class name to medium-. (What this means is that Foundation does something with the column widths we give it for medium and large screens, and treats it as if we didn’t specify any column widths at all on small screens—when you don’t specify column widths for elements, Foundation makes them full width and stacks them vertically.)

That’s pretty good, but I think it would look better if the thumbnails were below the big photo instead of above it. Foundation has classes you can add to make this happen.

The way you do it is like this. First, you change the order of the elements so that they appear correctly at small screen sizes. Then you add classes to move them left or right on larger screen sizes.

Let’s swap those two <div>s so they look like this:

Now we need to add push and pull classes to move these two columns to the left and right so that they are in the right positions for medium and large screens. Adding a push class pushes the column to the right, while a pull class pulls the column to the left.

We need to add the medium-push-1 class to the <div> that contains the big photo to push it one place to the right. This will leave the first column free for the thumbnails. Then we add the medium-pull-5 class to the <div> containing the thumbnails to pull it five places to the left, into the first column. This part of the code should now look like this:

Now if we look at it on a small screen (or shrink down our desktop browser window), we can see that the thumbnails are now below the big photo, just like we wanted (real example here):

And at larger screen sizes, the layout is just the same as before.

Conclusion

We’ve covered quite a lot of ground in this post. Stay tuned for the next post, where we’ll look at responsive enabling and responsive disclosure.

]]>http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-part-3/feed/0Forms: The Complete Guide–Part 2http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-the-complete-guide/
http://boxesandarrows.com/forms-the-complete-guide/#commentsThu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000http://boxesandarrows.com/?p=6117Forms are one of the most important parts of any site or app—they are the most common way for our users to give us the information that we need to help them do what they want to do.

But in many instances, we design forms statically, often as wireframes. But so often, what makes or breaks a form is what it’s like to interact with it. When the user clicks on a particular radio button, some additional inputs appear. How does that happen? More importantly, does the user understand what just happened?

Things like this are next to impossible to explore using static deliverables. But with a prototype of a form, it’s easy. And with a prototype form made in HTML, you can make it look and behave exactly like the real thing. Which means that once you’ve validated it with users, you can be sure that it can be implemented so that the appearance and feel are just the same.

This series does not try to explain what your form should contain, how the fields should be grouped and laid out, where to put primary and secondary buttons, and so on. There are lots of great resources out there that do that already. (Like Luke’s and Caroline and Gerry’s books. Or Justin’s article.)

No. What this series does is give you the how. You’ve already figured out what you think your form should contain and how it should behave. These posts will give you everything you need to know to make a prototype of your form in HTML, something that looks, works, and feels like the real thing. Which you can then use for usability testing, for getting stakeholder buy-in, and as a living specification for developers.

In the first post in this series, I showed you how to lay out a form and align the labels the way you want, using HTML and Foundation.

In this post, I’ll show you the different types of inputs available to you and how to use them.

To make the most of this post, I strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty by actually typing in the examples and then opening them in your browser to see how they look and work. From personal experience, this gets it into your brain, into your fingers, much better than just copying and pasting.

Input types

There are several different HTML elements that are used in forms. Buttons get their own element (<button>), as do drop-down lists (<select> and <option>), and multi-line text inputs (<textarea>).

But most form elements are the <input> element, with a type attribute that specifies what kind of input it is.

Let’s look at them one by one.

If you’re following along and actually typing this stuff in, you need to set up a new Foundation project, open up its index.html file, and delete all the sample content (see this post to find out how).

Then add an empty <form> element and the necessary Foundation layout elements.

Once you’ve got that set up, you can just add each example within the <fieldset> tags, after the <legend> element.

Note: In the code samples below, you’ll notice that all the <input> elements have both a name and an id. Why is this? It’s because you need the id to be able to identify individual HTML elements (to style them with CSS, etc.). But for a real form, you need name so that the data that gets sent to the server will be labeled correctly. These aren’t proper forms, they’re just prototypes. But it’s good to do it properly from the start. So the rule of thumb is: for <input>s, use both id and name, and give them both the same value. (An exception is radio buttons—I explain why they’re different below.)

Text and its variants

Text

An <input> of type text is just a simple input field. There are no restrictions on what the user can type in it (though there are attributes that you can add to do things like limit the length of the field’s contents—see below).

Password

An <input> of type password behaves exactly the same as a text input, except that whatever you type in it is obscured.

Email

An <input> of type email is the same as a text input, except that on phones and tablets, the keyboard that is displayed has @ and dot keys as standard—you don’t have to go digging for them:

Keyboard displayed based on attribute

It also gives you validation for free. If you enter something other than a valid email address and then submit the form, the browser will do something like this:

(This is true for desktop browsers anyway. Most mobile browsers don’t do this yet.)

URL

The url <input> type is similar to email, except here you get a keyboard layout with slash and dot keys (and maybe others, such as .com).

Keyboard displayed based on attribute

Again, desktop browsers validate these automatically:

Phone number

The tel <input> type, as we saw in the previous post, gives you a phone keypad on smartphones:

Keyboard displayed based on attribute

Number

The number <input> type doesn’t restrict what you can type, but on smartphones (the iPhone, at least), you get the regular keyboard, switched to numbers-and-symbols mode:

Keyboard displayed based on attribute

Different desktop browsers render this input differently. In IE and Firefox, it looks the same as a text input, but in Chrome and Safari, it gets spinner controls for increasing and decreasing the value:

You can set minimum and/or maximum values, and a step size. These affect the behavior of those spinner controls.

Autosuggest

Empty:

Typing:

You can use an <input> with a list attribute paired with a <datalist> element to get something that is kind of a cross between a text input and a drop-down list. As you type in the input, a dropdown list shows you matching options. You can click on an option or use the arrow keys and Enter to select.

Other types

There are a number of other <input> types that were introduced with HTML5, but most of them are not widely supported yet. These include color and various date and time inputs, such as date, time, datetime, datetime-local, week, and month.

The rest

Checkboxes

If you give an <input> a type of checkbox, you get a checkbox. These usually have their label to the right. For checkboxes, the for attribute is particularly important—it makes the label clickable—clicking it is just like clicking the checkbox itself. Adding the checked attribute (which doesn’t take an argument) makes the checkbox checked when the page loads. For a prototype it doesn’t really matter, but a checkbox in a real form must have a value attribute.

Radio buttons

Like checkboxes, with <input>s of type radio, the label usually comes after the input. And for and checked work the same here too. Here though, be sure to give all the radio buttons in a group the same name attribute—this tells the browser that they belong together, and that only one can be selected at a time. Again, like with checkboxes, every radio button must have a value.

Sliders

An <input> of type range gives you a slider. Like with number, you can specify a minimum, maximum, and step values. But this control is not hugely useful on its own—if precision is not an issue, you can probably get away with just adding text before and after the <input> to show the maximum and minimum values. But in most cases, you’ll probably want to provide some sort of feedback so the user knows what value they have selected.

This is not difficult. It requires a tiny bit of Javascript, but you’ll see in a minute that it’s really no big deal. We just need to take the existing bit of HTML and add an <output> element to show the value. And we add an oninput attribute to the <input> to tell it what to do when its value changes.

In this version, the <input> and <output> elements are in separate columns, and I’ve given the <input> a width of 100% so it will stretch to fill its column:

The little bit of Javascript that is the value of oninput just sets the value of the output (range_value.value) to the value of the input (range_input.value). (range_value is the <output>‘s ID, and range_input is the <input>‘s ID. Adding the dot and value just means “the value of the value attribute of the element with this ID.”)

Drop-down lists

Closed:

Open:

Drop-down lists are not <input> elements—they are made up of a <select> element containing a number of <option> elements.

This is fairly straightforward. One thing I’ve added here though is the first <option>—it prompts the user what to do, but is not actually an option they can select. (The selected attribute means it is what is displayed in the closed dropdown before the user interacts with it.)

Without this option, “Option 1″ would be selected by default. Usually we don’t want anything to be selected by default.

Textareas

A <textarea> is like a text <input>, except it lets you enter multiple lines of text. Like all the text-like <input>s, its width is 100% of the column that it’s in.

As for height, there are two ways to set this. One way is to set the height in CSS (or directly on the element by adding a style attribute). The other way is to use the rows attribute, like I’m doing here. This makes the <textarea> tall enough to fit six lines of text.

(The style="height: auto;" attribute is to get around a bug in Foundation. If you set the height to a specific value instead of using rows, you won’t need this.)

Buttons

Most forms have buttons that you have to click to send the information you’ve entered to the server. Some also have a button for a secondary action, to cancel out or to reset the form (though some argue that such secondary actions are usually a bad idea).

Here, the buttons are <input>s of type submit and button. (submit is a special kind of button for submitting a form.) The right place to put these is after the closing </fieldset> tag.

The Submit button gets a class of button to make it into a nice-looking Foundation button, while the Cancel button also gets a class of secondary to make it visually less prominent.

Foundation also lets you use the <a> element for making buttons—just give it a class of button. It also lets you do stuff like make buttons smaller, give them rounded corners, and so on, just by adding classes.

Other clever Foundation stuff

Foundation lets you do some clever things that the standard HTML elements don’t let you do.

For example, you can combine an input with a label to get something like this:

Important attributes

I mentioned a few attributes along the way, like id and name, checked for checkboxes and radio buttons, min, max, and step for number and range type inputs, and so on. But there are some others that you need to know about.

autocomplete

Browsers try to help us by automatically filling in form fields for us when they can. But sometimes this is not appropriate, for example, for sensitive information such as bank account and credit card numbers (and even passwords in certain cases, though beware of being annoying with this one).

Setting autocomplete to off for an input tells the browser not to fill it in automatically.

autofocus

On each page, you can give one (and only one) form control the autofocus attribute. This field will get focus when the page loads, so the user can start interacting with it without having to click in it or tab to it.

disabled

A control with the disabled attribute gets greyed out and you can’t interact with it. This may be because it’s not relevant unless some other control has a particular value. (For example, if your form has a “How did you hear about us” section with radio buttons, the last one might be “Other”, with a text input so the user can type something that’s not in your list. It makes sense to make this input disabled unless “Other” is selected. I’ll cover this sort of thing in more depth in a subsequent post.)

maxlength

Text-type inputs (text, email, url, tel, etc.) can have a maxlength attribute. This lets you specify the maximum length in characters. Most browsers won’t let you type any more once you hit the limit. This is handy for things like phone numbers, which can’t be longer than a certain number of digits.

multiple

The <select> element and <input>s of type email (also of type file, for uploading files, which I haven’t covered here) can take the multiple attribute. This lets you select multiple items in a dropdown or specify multiple email addresses, respectively.

Notice how the <select> is displayed differently when multiple selection is enabled.

pattern

pattern tells the browser what an acceptable value looks like. I’ll cover this in a subsequent post when I talk about validation.

placeholder

The placeholder attribute puts hint text inside the <input> (or <textarea>), to give the user an idea of what they need to type. It disappears when you click in the <input>. Some sites use it to indicate which fields are mandatory and which are optional.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT use this instead of a <label>. It is very bad from both accessibility and usability points of view.

required

The required attribute means that a field is mandatory. It doesn’t change its appearance (an asterisk doesn’t magically appear next to its label), but if you submit the form without filling it in, you’ll get a helpful message:

tabindex

The tabindex attribute (which has a numerical value) determines the order in which controls get focus when the user presses the Tab key.

If you’re doing something weird with your form layout such that the inputs are in a different order on the screen than in the page source, you should use the tabindex attribute to make sure that focus jumps to the right input when the user tabs between them.

Special considerations

On phones and tablets, there are additional challenges that we face. How often have you come to sign in or register at a site on your phone and seen something like this?

On m.hpdirect.com, as I’m typing in the User ID field in the login form, my phone is automatically capitalizing the first letter and wants to correct what I’m typing to words it has in its dictionary. So now I have to tap the little “x” to dismiss autocorrect, and go back and change the capital “M” to a lowercase one. Grrr.

For fields like this, there are two attributes that we can add to turn off this antisocial behavior: autocorrect and autocapitalize.

They both take the same values: on and off. By default, they are on.

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a pretty good idea of the building blocks that you can use to create your prototype forms.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to group inputs into logical (and less overwhelming-looking) groups and how to provide help to users while they are filling in the form.